Athenaeum Review

Our guest on this episode is Suzanne Preston Blier, the Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

In this episode
About the AfricaMap project at Harvard, its origins and objectives (1:15) — How she researched and wrote the book Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power and Identity, c. 1300 (10:00) — How risk and power play into the practice of pure copper life-size casting, and the trade along the Niger River (14:45) — The origins of her book The Anatomy of Architecture: Ontology and Metaphor in Batammaliba Architectural Expression (17:15) — Independent farmers in Vermont and on the Benin-Togo border (17:45) — Advice for graduate students writing up their research: “Ask yourself, what was the most shocking thing that happened to you?” (20:45) — Discovering that each of the key parts of a Batammaliba house has an anatomical reference (22:00) — What Batammaliba houses are like (22:45) — The book African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power and the origins of bocio objects in 19th-century Dahomey, in contrast to the better-publicized royal arts there (27:00) — The slave trade and the arrival of the French in Dahomey (29:00) — How Joseph Leo Koerner’s Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art inspired the structure of the book (30:45) — Is Picasso doing cultural appropriation? (32:00) — The Demoiselles and complex symbolizations of global womanhood (34:45) — African art at Harvard: the institutional situation (38:00)

Our guest on this episode is Yve-Alain Bois, professor of art history in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

In this episode
How the former state of art history in France influenced his decision to come to the United States (1:00) — How the conflict between formalism and social history set the context for Painting as Model (3:00) — The journal October and the art-historical establishment since Panofsky (7:00) — The diverse critical viewpoints among the authors of Art Since 1900: agreements and disagreements (11:00) — Painting today, for example the case of R. H. Quaytman (13:30) — Matisse, Barnes, and the problem of scale (16:30) — Matisse on Proust, Bergson, muscle memory, reflexes and automatism (20:15) — Matisse’s two kinds of drawings: conscious and unconscious (22:30) — Matisse’s Interior with Egyptian Curtain at the Phillips Collection (24:15)

Our guest on this episode is John Mraz, the world’s leading authority on photography in Mexico. Among his books are Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity ; Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons ; and Nacho López: Mexican Photographer. He’s the curator of Los Hermanos Mayo: Photographing Exile, which was recently on view at UT Dallas.

In Part 2
How Dr. Mraz was thrown out of his first three universities, worked in a steel mill and as a dam builder after the Army, and got into Latin American history (0:45) — How he started making documentary films, and moved from UC Santa Barbara to UC Santa Cruz (4:30) — Documenting the workers’ movement from Berkeley to Mexico City (7:00) — Networking over drinks, and making documentary films for Mexican television (9:00) — Working at the once-Marxist, now-neoliberal University of Puebla, and getting commissions to make films (11:45) — The academic status of photography: its contextual and comparative analysis as distinct from the concept of “art” (15:30) — The approach to photography in his current book project (19:30) — Visual analysis as against the power of commercial marketing imagery (22:30) — The need for visual theory (Vilem Flusser, John Berger, Walter Benjamin, Ariella Azoulay) not just literary theory (25:00) — The problems with elitist postmodernism, against the reality principle in Mexican life (26:00) —

Our guest on this episode is John Mraz, the world’s leading authority on photography in Mexico. Among his books are Looking for Mexico: Modern Visual Culture and National Identity ; Photographing the Mexican Revolution: Commitments, Testimonies, Icons ; and Nacho López: Mexican Photographer. He’s the curator of Los Hermanos Mayo: Photographing Exile, which was recently on view at UT Dallas.

In Part 1

How Los Hermanos Mayo, a photojournalists’ collective, emerged from the Spanish Civil War and how they migrated to Mexico (1:00) — Their working methods and techniques, and how they preserved their enormous archive of negatives (4:00) — How Dr. Mraz entered the documentary field (6:45) — Background on the bracero program for temporary farmworkers in the U.S. (7:45) — How this exhibition, book and documentary was put together (9:15) — Los Hermanos Mayo’s aesthetic and iconographical approach to representing workers (11:45) — The advent of the small-format 35mm camera and its implications (13:15) — Cropping and titling photographs, or how Nacho López and Los Hermanos Mayo fit between art and photojournalism (18:15) — The depths of Los Hermanos Mayo’s catalog, with its millions of images (22:00).